Hope was singing high in her heart now, but she almost despaired of such good fortune after a diligent search.  Then something told her to feel about again on the floor.  Round and round she went, getting her fingers into spider webs and sticky substances that renewed her inward shudders because she could not identify them.  And when she found the rope, a tarry coil, she also solved the mystery of the tools.  They had fallen down behind the coil of rope and were effectively fenced off from the circle of floor explored by the bewildered Betty.

It was the work of a moment to tie one end of the rope to a heavy staple driven under the window sill, and then, closing her eyes to the pitch black void beneath her, Betty let herself slide down to the roof.  Her hands were cruelly scratched by the rope fibres and she was too tired to care about the evidences of her flight.

“If anybody wants to know about that rope and the locked door, let ’em!” she sighed defiantly.

Bobby woke up as Betty came in the door, and then there were questions galore to be answered.  Betty was covered with dust and her clothing was torn and rumpled.  Bobby declared she looked as if she had been to war.

“I feel it,” admitted Betty.  “Let me take a hot bath and get into bed.  And, Bobby, promise me on your word of honor that you’ll call me in the morning.  Whoever locked me in expects me to stay there till I’m missed, and I want to walk into breakfast as usual.”

She half regretted her instructions when Bobby called her at seven the next morning, but Betty was nothing if not gritty, and she sleepily struggled into her clothes.  Ada Nansen’s look of utter astonishment when she saw Betty come into the dining room with the rest for breakfast told those in the secret what they had already suspected.

“Bobby must have heard her listening at our door last night,” said Betty.  “What am I going to do?  Why nothing, of course!  That was part of the stunt, or at least I’m going to consider it so.  My card is there, so they’ll know I fulfilled my part.”

Dave McGuire scratched his head when he found the rope and the open window, but he wisely said nothing.  He had two keys, and one he had loaned at the request of the senior class president to a fellow student.  The other key, for emergency use, hung on a nail in the fourth story hall.  That was the key Dave found in the door lock when he made his early morning tour of inspection.  “But the young folks must be having their fun,” he said indulgently, “and, short of burning down the place, ’tis not Dave McGuire who will be interfering with ’em.”

Mid-term tests were approaching.  Bobby, who, with all her love of fun, was a hard student, felt prepared and went around serenely.  Constance Howard had, most humanly, neglected, so far as the teacher of mathematics permitted, the study that was hardest for her, her algebra.  She now spent hours in “cramming” on this, meanwhile complaining to those of her special chums who would listen to her of “the unfairness of being made to study algebra.”